I am not a sailor in the way that Sven is a sailor. I work underwater rather than above it, and the specific relationship I have with the sea is the relationship of the professional diver rather than the passage maker: the platform leg, the pipeline inspection, the underwater structural survey that requires the specific combination of technical knowledge and physical tolerance that offshore diving produces in the people who do it for long enough. My world is vertical where Sven’s is horizontal, and the specific skills we each have in the water are as different as the directions in which we use them.
And yet we have been friends for twenty-five years, and the friendship has always had water in it, and whenever Sven’s boat was somewhere accessible I was at the dock within a reasonable period of knowing where it was. Not because I planned to be there. Because this is how the friendship works: Sven is at the boat and I find a reason to be near the boat, and the reason is always available because the reason is the friendship and the friendship has always been reason enough.
The Geography of the Friendship
The best friendships have a geography: a specific kind of place or context where they are most themselves, where the two people are most completely the people who chose each other rather than the people their various roles in the world require them to be. The geography of this friendship is the dock, the marina, the specific waterfront context where Sven is in his element and where I have always been comfortable in the way that the offshore professional is comfortable anywhere the water is visible and accessible.
Antwerp, primarily, where the friendship started and where the shared world of the Belgian maritime community produced the context in which two people who both spent most of their professional time in or near the water inevitably found each other. But also wherever the boat was over the twenty-five years that followed: the Mediterranean legs of the yacht delivery work, the sailing school events, the passages that Sven was running and that I could reach in a weekend.
The friendship has been maintained at every dock that was accessible, and the continuity of the maintenance is the evidence of what the friendship is: not the convenience friendship that the proximity of shared work produces but the chosen friendship that finds reasons to continue when the convenience is absent.
What I Saw at the Dock
What I saw at the dock across twenty-five years is the thing that I want to describe because it is the thing that makes the Naora voyage make sense to me in the way that I think it will make sense to the people who are reading this article and considering whether it makes sense for them. What I saw was a man who was always more himself at the boat than anywhere else. Not performing the sailing role, not being the captain for the benefit of the audience, not the professional version of the relationship with the sea: simply present in his element in the specific way that only the person who has found their element can be present.
Twenty-five years of watching this is twenty-five years of evidence for a single conclusion: the Naora voyage is not Sven’s next project. It is Sven. The projects, the sailing school, the deliveries, the offshore passages, the OCC membership, the certifications, the twenty-five years of building the offshore capability that the voyage requires: all of those were the preparation.
The Naora voyage is the thing they were all preparing for, and the friend who has been at the dock for twenty-five years can see the preparation and the thing it prepared more clearly than the person who is inside it. I have been watching. The voyage makes sense. I will be at the dock in Bodrum in May 2027 when the lines come off.
